Friday, July 13, 2012

Grab What You Can

On the day that the Maoists launched their "people's
war" on 15 February 1996, they attacked the Small Farmer's Development
Project in Gorkha. This was no coincidence, it was part of a systematic
strategy to eliminate all personalities and organisations that had public
respect and credibility and take Nepal to Year Zero.

The Small Farmer's Development Project was the institution that
Nepal's subsistence farmers trusted and relied on the most. Farmers had access
to micro-credit and an alternative to the clutches of rural loan sharks.

The next target of the Maoists was to remove the cooperatives,
mothers' groups, and local community organisations by either killing their
inspirational leaders, or hounding them out of the villages with threats and
intimidation.

After that, they zeroed in on the Village Development Councils,
the elected bodies that made it possible for grassroots democracy to be
responsive to the people's needs. VDCs were where the people went to register
births, death, get citizenship certificates, but by the end of the war, nearly
all the VDCs buildings in the country had either been bombed out, or abandoned.

Next, the Maoists attacked village police posts, driving out the
state's security presence from the countryside. By the end of the war, the
demoralised police had been withdrawn to fortified joint command bases in the
district capitals.

As they encircled Kathmandu, the Maoists said they would 'step on
the shoulder to hit the head'. In this they turned the NC and UML not just into
the 'shoulder' but also the 'shield' with which to sideline king Gyanendra. The
Maoists regarded the democratic parties as 'useful idiots', and the NC and UML
did their best to behave as such during thepost-2006 phase.

The party's tactics changed after the war from armed struggle to
peaceful politics, but its end goal of dominating the state did not. In this,
they ran circles around the UML and NC, played them against each other, dangled
carrots in front of them, exploited the greed and ambition of their leaders and
used them like pawns.

In
the past four years the Maoists held on to their guerrilla force till the last
possible moment as a bargaining chip. They used the Constituent Assembly as a
proxy forum for identity politics. The truth is that they never wanted a
constitution, they have always only wanted to grab as much power as possible by
whatever means possible.

The
only institutions standing in the way of power now are the media, the Supreme
Court, Nepal Army, some sections of civil society and the office of the
president. These the Maoists are trying to pick off one by one. They have
bought into tv, print and radio, they are trying to undermine the courts and
they are interfering openly with the army's command structure.

During the week before May 27, reporters were singled out
deliberately for attack by a Maoist-supported banda in Kathmandu enforced by
the Janajati Mahasangh. It was an experiment to cow down the media and it
worked. The latest target of the Maoists is to undermine and weaken the
president's office.

Despite their use of trickery, deceit, threats, intimidation it is
not going to be easy for the Maoists to use identity politics as a weapon to
get to power. The upshot of the recent visit by senior Chinese officials was
that the Maoist leadership got an earful about stirring the ethnic pot in
Nepal. On the other hand, there is a section of the Maoists which is pushing
for ethnic federalism because it is taking orders from a New Delhi
establishment still paranoid about the threat of a Greater Nepal.

Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal looks like a tired and defeated
man these days. He has lost the glow most powerful leaders have as he has
fallen prey to his own manipulations. He is caught between geopolitical
pressures from the north and south, his party is split and in tatters, and his
lies have finally caught up with him.

On the afternoon of 27 May, a draft of the new constitution was
ready, there had been a compromise wording on ethnicity-based federalism acceptable
to all, the NC and UML had agreed on 14 provinces, the invitations for the
signing ceremony at Shital Niwas were ready.

It was clear that had Dahal wanted it, a new constitution was
possible. But at 4 pm on 27 May Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai suddenly
decided to dissolve the CA without a constitution and announced elections.
Dahal and Bhattarai were present when the constitution that they fought for 10
years at the cost of 16,000 lives was about to be born. But they decided to
abort. Who was trying to outsmart whom?

Gopal Guragain is a broadcaster and the founder of Communication
Corner & Ujjyalo Multimedia